Monday, November 29, 2010

Watch the atheist writer and the former prime minister clash over religion in Toronto.

The full debate between Christopher Hitchens (who I interviewed earlier this year) and Tony Blair is now available to watch online. The pair debated whether religion was a force for good in the world.

So, for the many of you who have already read the full transcript, here are their opening statements. Hitchens begins speaking at 04:58 and Blair begins at 12:26. The reminder of Blair's opening statement is included in the second video, which also features a rebuttal from each man.

In a vote after the debate, 68 per cent of the audience sided with Hitchens and 32 per cent with Blair. Now you've got a chance to make your own mind up.

Christopher Hitchens talks about his cancer (1'5"-1'45"), living day-to-day (1'50"-2'10"), are you terrified of dying of cancer? (2'10"- 3'40"), the pathetic fallacy (3'40-4'35"), does it make you angry? (4'35"- 6'30"), how do you think about life now? (6'30"- 7'30"), Pascals Wager (22' 15"- 25' 30"), do you fear death? (25'30-27'), has it been a life well lived? (27'- 29')

Why Criticism of Religion is Important

What would you like to see & do with the rest of your life? (7'30"-8'5"), why criticising Mother Teresa was important (10'-11'20"), Iraq (12'-14'), conflict between West & Islamofaschism (19'20"-20'20"), conflict between theocracy /totalitarianism & The Enlightenment / freethought (20'20"-21'30"), The Bible, Koran & Torah - works of man made (not divine) fiction (21' - 21'30"), mockery of religion (21'30"-22'15")

Firstly, the term ‘faith’ needs some clarification as it is an everyday word that has several meanings depending on the context in which it is used. The following two main dictionary definitions are given as examples of common usage and understanding:

1. Complete trust or confidence in someone or something: this restores one’s faith in politicians.

2. Strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.

The New Oxford Dictionary of English.

Atheism is solely concerned with religious faith as described in definition 2 above.

Faith is belief without evidence. Particularly in a religious context, it can be belief despite evidence to the contrary. An example of this is faith that God created all life on Earth no more than 6,ooo years ago (Creationism), despite the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution and natural selection.

Evidence can be scientifically investigated, supported or refuted. Faith through religious indoctrination or ‘spiritual apprehension’ does not, by its very nature, provide any credible evidence to investigate.

Religious apologists often use faith as evidence for their theistic claims (sometimes referred to as the ‘argument from faith’). This is meaningless. Faith, by its very nature, provides no evidence whatever and exists solely in the mind of the believer.

Atheism’s ultimate goal is the end of religious faith – the false and irrational belief that God exists – and of religion, the social manifestation of faith.

A few people have asked, “Why is such an organization necessary?” or “What are you going to do that other organizations like the National Secular Society (NSS) or British Humanist Society (BHA) aren’t already doing?” It is a fair question, and the main answer to this is that none of the groups mentioned actually promote atheism. They do not, as a matter of course, challenge religions directly, question the validity of the concept of faith, or criticize pronouncements made by the religious institutions. At Atheism, we will be challenging religious claims and the propagation of religious faith.

At the last NSS Annual General Meeting (November 2009), its President, Terry Sanderson, stated that it was not their job to promote atheism and at present there is not an organization that is doing so. He went on to explain that the current non-theistic movement is made up of three “arms”, and we at Atheism have modeled this into a simple Venn diagram as a graphical aid to differentiate where we fit in as an organization (please note this diagram is schematic and not to scale).

Each of the circles represent the following movements:

Secularism is the political movement to separate church and state, and to challenge and remove religious privilege.

Non-Theistic “Lifestances” are more positive “alternatives” to faith and religion, such as humanism, PEARLism, scientism and the like. They promote ethical systems, ways of thinking and ways of life.

Active atheism is the challenging of faith – the belief, in the absence of evidence, that God exists – as a bad thing per se. From this follows the challenging of religion, its doctrines, pronouncements and teachings. Until now there has been no distinctively atheist organization in the UK, which is why this organization has been formed.

At Atheism, we do, by definition, support and promote secularism, and we have common ground with non-theistic “lifestances” – hence the overlap. We will work with their promoting organizations where appropriate. However, we will be doing things that they do not (or will not) do and vice versa.

“Living in the moment really does make people happier,” reported The Guardian.

It said, “people are distracted from the task at hand nearly half of the time and this daydreaming consistently makes them less happy”.

Researchers surveyed people using an iPhone application, asking about their mood, current activity and whether they were focused on the task at hand. People whose mind was wandering to an unpleasant or neutral topic reported that they were less happy than people who were focussed on what they were doing.

This is innovative research, and the application of smartphones in this way is likely to be employed in future studies. However, the method by which the participants were recruited meant that they were likely to know the rationale behind the study, which may have affected their responses. The research was also limited to iphone users, and so may not be representative of the population as a whole.

The study is continuing should anyone wish to take part in it. People may want to take this research in the good-natured spirit in which it is intended, rather than being genuinely concerned about how their mind wandering affects their happiness.

Where did the story come from?

The study was carried out by researchers from Harvard University. The funding source for this research was not stated. The study was published in the (peer-reviewed) journal Science.

The research was covered accurately by the Daily Mail and The Guardian. However, both newspapers could have paid more attention to how the participants were recruited to the study and the bias that may have arisen from this.

What kind of research was this?

The researchers say that humans are the only animal to spend a lot of time “thinking about what’s not going on around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future or may not happen at all”. They say that “many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering”. In this cross-sectional study, they aimed to investigate whether people who let their mind wander were less happy than those who “lived in the moment”.

To answer this question, the researchers opted to carry out what they called ‘experience sampling’, which involves contacting people as they engage in everyday activities and asking about their thoughts, feelings and actions at that moment. They consider this to be the most reliable method for investigating real-world emotion, and a better method than asking how people felt about an event in the past which they may not be able to recall accurately. However, this sort of sampling can be unfeasible, especially if many people need to be surveyed.

The researchers therefore made an application on the iPhone, which contacted participants at random times throughout the day to ask about their mood and activities. This allowed them to collect data from a large sample of people.

What did the research involve?

The participants volunteered online by signing up at the researcher’s website, which had received national press coverage. A total of 2,250 adults signed up, 59% of whom were men and 74% were living in the US. All participants were over 18 with an average age of 34.

The participants were asked the times at which they woke up and went to sleep, and how many times they would be willing to receive a sample request (between one and three times a day). A computer program generated random times for the participants to be contacted each day, and given a selection from a variety of mood and activity assessment questions.

For example, participants were asked, ‘How are you feeling right now?’, to which they answered by giving a rating on a sliding scale from very bad (0) to very good (100). The participants were also asked, ‘What are you doing right now?’ and chose from a list of 22 activities such as working, watching TV or talking. They were also asked a mind-wandering question, ‘Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?’. Possible answers were: No; Yes, something pleasant; Yes, something neutral or Yes, something unpleasant. Out of an average of 50 requests. the participants answered 83%.

What were the basic results?

The researchers found that the participant’s minds wandered frequently, and reported that their mind was wandering 47% of the time they were contacted.

When the 22 activities were analysed separately there was a range in the proportion of participants that reported their mind wandering across the activities. However, for the majority of the activities at least 30% of the participants were not focussed on the task. The only activity in which over 70% of the participants were entirely focussed when contacted was making love.

The researchers used a statistical technique called multilevel regression to see whether there was an association between mind wandering and happiness. They found that when people said that their mind was wandering, they also said that they were less happy. People’s minds were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (43% of samples) than unpleasant (27%) or neutral topics (31%).

The researchers found that when people were thinking about pleasant topics they were no happier than if they were concentrating on the activity in hand. However, if their mind had strayed to neutral or negative thoughts, they reported that they were less happy than people whose mind had not wandered.

There was variation in how happy each different activity made each participant and also variation in how happy an activity made one participant compared to another participant. However if a participants mind was wandering, this had a more variable influence on their overall happiness compared to the activity they were doing.

How did the researchers interpret the results?

The researchers conclude, “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind”.

They say that there are evolutionary advantages to mind wandering, such as allowing people to learn, reason and plan, but that the “ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost”.

Conclusion

This research developed a method for ‘real-time sampling’ a large number of people’s moods using smart phone technology. This new approach may be of great interest to other researchers and could prove to be a valuable technique for answering other questions.

This study may have found an association between reported happiness ‘in the moment’ and mind-wandering, but it does not show that people who spend most of their time daydreaming are less happy overall than people who spend more time focussed on what they’re doing.

The real-time sampling approach was well thought out but there are several limitations to this research that may affect how well it applies to the population as a whole. Firstly, the participants were all recruited through the research group’s web page, and this may have biased the type of person who participated. For example, people who had an interest in the philosophy of living in the moment may have been more likely to participate.

The study also received national press coverage in the US, though it is not clear whether this coverage would have revealed what the study was about. If participants know what the researchers are interested in, this can affect how they respond.

Lastly, to take part, participants had to possess an iphone, and people who own these devices may differ in personality and socioeconomic background from the general population. One example of this is that the average age of the participants was 34, which is lower than if the sample had been representative of the age range of the general population.

The study is continuing should anyone wish to take part in it. People may want to take this research in the good-natured spirit in which it is intended, rather than being genuinely concerned about how their mind wandering affects their happiness.

Friday, November 05, 2010

The terminally ill Christopher Hitchens refuses to embrace the easy consolation of religion. He is an example to us all.

In his beautiful book The Needs of Strangers, Michael Ignatieff tells the story of the death of the sceptical philosopher David Hume. Ignatieff describes James Boswell sitting aghast at Hume’s bedside as the great rationalist refuses, even at his very last, to take the consolation on offer from divinity. Hume dies a death with no illusions and no regrets. Ignatieff points out that this is a death of which few of us are now capable. In secular societies we have lost Boswell’s religious certainty without acquiring Hume’s equanimity. We still have the terror but no longer the consolation.

On November 26, in Ignatieff’s home city of Toronto, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens will debate whether religion is a force for peace or for conflict. The event is lent extra gravity, of course, because Hitchens, 61, had cancer of the oesophagus diagnosed on June 30. His chance of recovery is, alas, slight.

But we are witnessing, as Hitchens argues and writes his way towards the darkness, a modern equivalent of the death of Hume. Hitchens is dying according to his atheism: stoically, far from the fold of religious consolation.

In an interview with CNN, Hitchens was clear in his response to those of the faithful who, praying on his behalf, hope for a death-bed conversion: “I can tell you: not while I’m lucid, no.”

Then, in a remarkable essay in Vanity Fair on his intimation of mortality, Hitchens, as he does so often, made the killer point: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’, the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, Why not?’”

If Michael Ignatieff, now the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, were to attend the debate in Toronto, he could remind the audience that Humean stoicism in the face of the enemy is incredibly rare. At a recent funeral of a relative I said, because he had been a geologist, that we all go to the rocks and the soil in the end. Yet I knew at the time that was hardly the consolation that people were seeking. For those who still have religious certainty there is a whole armoury of gone-to-a-better-place comforts.

But in a country where humanist funerals doubled in the late 1990s and then rose a further 150 per cent in the first decade of the new century, this is not available. We retain the funeral rites but we have become distanced from their content.

Who among the congregation knew that the flowers were once thought to gain favour with the spirit of the departed? At the wake, over the drinks and the sausage rolls with relatives we only see when we gather to count the family down, who knew we were there to keep watch, in the hope that life would return? Draped in black as we were, was anyone aware that this pagan garb was designed to hide our identities from avenging spirits?

There was a consoling beauty in the hymns, although even Cwm Rhondda doesn’t help that much if you believe, as Christopher Hitchens does and as I do, that it’s the rocks and the soil and nowhere better.

Soon, unless there is a materialist miracle, Christopher Hitchens will be heading underground too. And that fact needs to be marked because, through 40 years as a prolific essayist, Hitchens has been exactly the lucid, sceptical witness of which we always have too few. He has set out the case for atheism, with verve and in detail, in the polemic god is Not Great.

But it is actually Hitchens’ late conversion to scepticism in politics that has inspired the scorn of former comrades on the Left. Hitchens, they say, has turned from the idealistic Left to the neo- conservative Right. The most obvious manifestation of this apostasy is his characterstically voluble support for the War on Terror and action in Iraq. Hitchens needs no defence from anyone else but, as it happens, his support for the war in Iraq is entirely consistent with his previous support for the Falklands war and for American intervention in Bosnia. On each occasion he has taken sides against fascism in its various guises. As he said in 2002: “I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials.” The better critique of Hitchens is not that he has betrayed the cause. It is that, much like his Toronto adversary Tony Blair, his account of global religious conflict reduces a complex problem to a Manichean one. But it is hard to repulse the insinuating thought: what if he’s right? Hitchens has, indeed, moved. He has given up a belief in a political utopia and replaced it with the insight that the combination of capitalism with liberal democracy needs to be cherished and defended. If only Hitchens had a full term to pursue this belief. As he says in Love, Poverty and War: “It is civilisation and pluralism and secularism that need pitiless and unapologetic fighters.” The shame is that it took until the end of his memoirs, which will be in turn too close to the end of his life, before Hitchens stumbled on what he calls his “Hitch-22”: that we must commit to our beliefs while remaining sceptical about those who are fired by certainty. The old comrades simply cannot fathom that acquiring scepticism in politics, and in the process throwing off defunct beliefs, is the same process as acquiring wisdom.

The books that will now not be written by this great writer at the height of his power are a sorry loss. For it was Christopher Hitchens who taught me about the genius of George Orwell and the moral culpability of Henry Kissinger. It was Christopher Hitchens who hardened and exemplified my low view of Bill Clinton and who skewered the saintly reputation of the “Papa Doc” Duvalier supporter, Mother Teresa. And in the literary world it was Christopher Hitchens who did what Tony Blair did in politics, and put into passionate prose the stakes that were raised after September 11, 2001. Reading the collected essays again in preparation for this piece, I learnt something on every page. If you have not read them, I urge you to do so. The most fitting testimonial is surely to read the work because it is there, in the work, that you find, as Nabokov says, the only immortality that you and I will share: the refuge of art.

Then we can wonder at the fact that, after all the lessons that Hitchens has taught us on the page, he is now conducting, before the curtain call, a lesson that most of us have no idea if we can learn. He is teaching us how to die a stoical death.